Finding Gold in Cuyamaca
Looking east from San Diego on a clear day, you will see a series of three peaks, the Cuyamacas. They are, from south to north, Cuyamaca Peak, Middle Peak and North Peak. They are at about 6,500 feet but don't seem that high because the surrounding area is also high land. If the day isn't so clear and you can't see them, then they have lived up to their name, which means "beyond the clouds" in the Cumayaay Indian language.
Gold was discovered in those hills in 1870, near the town of Julian. Very near the town of Julian. Within five months the first mine had been dug. By 1910 about six million dollars worth of gold had been mined from the mountains. No gold worth mining has been discovered since that time. Almost all of the old mines have either burned down or been filled in by bulldozing.
The gold from the area took the form of a very fine flour or dust, not nuggets or wire, and it was found in clusters of quartz crystals in the schertz typical of the region. Because it was so fine as to be almost invisible, much gold was lost and placer gold mining was difficult -- you can't recover what you can't see.
A typical mine started with a vertical shaft, the deepest going only six hundred feet. When promising materials were encountered, horizontal drifts were constructed and the quartz collected from the walls and ceilings of those areas by blasting. The quartz would then be raised to the surface by bucket, crushed in a mill and treated chemically to aggregate the gold.
Miners received about $2.50 per day for this dark, dangerous work. For comparison, ordinary laborers of the time received between $0.50 and $1.00 per day wages. The work mostly consisted of drilling a pattern of holes in the rock with hammer and drills, then filling the holes with black powder or other explosive and setting it off, then moving the rubble to the surface by bucket. At first the only light was candles; later they had acetelene lamps.
Six million dollars may not seem like much of a gold rush. There are many houses in the San Diego area valued that much or higher. But the real value of the mining is not the gold that was removed but the tradition that was created.
In October it is almost impossible to find a place to park in or around Julian. The place overflows with tourists. They come, in part, for the annual apple festival ... but Julian, the apple festival, the whole frontier atmosphere of the area, all exist to a great extent because of the mining that was done there. You can actually tour one of the old mines, the Eagle mine, for about $8, inside the city of Julian, and it is a tour worth taking if only to impress upon you the hardships those old miners endured.
They are still mining gold in the Cuyamacas, but the gold is tourism.
Comments (2)
Good, informative post. Have you been to Julian recently?
No, I haven't visited Julian. As usual, the information mostly comes from a class taken at Oasis.
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